I received a sample of QNAP's new TS-219 Turbo NAS today. The TS-119 and
TS-219 devices are an upgrade to QNAP's TS-109 and TS-209 devices and were
announced earlier this month at CeBIT. The new TS-219 uses the same robust
case as the TS-209 but offers much more performance:

Marvell Kirkwood 6281 at 1.2 GHz (instead of Orion 5182 at 500 MHz)

512 MB RAM (instead of 128 or 256 MB)

16 MB flash (instead of 8 MB)

The numbers I've seen about the Kirkwood CPU suggest that the TS-219 will
indeed give a very significant performance boost. So far, the TS-219 looks
very nice. My only complaint is that QNAP didn't export the second
Ethernet port the Kirkwood chip offers, but I suspect this is because they
wanted to stay as close to the original design of the TS-209 as possible.

In any case, the TS-219 is a nice machine and I look forward to porting
Debian to it. As a first step, this means getting the mainline kernel to
run on the device and adding a kernel for Kirkwood to the archive (the
latter is needed for a number of other devices based on Kirkwood anyway).
Hopefully, the remaining porting work and integration into the Debian
installer should be fairly straightforward given that the TS-209 is already
supported in Debian. I'm sure I'll find out as I dig into the details...

I'll give periodic updates of my progress. In the meantime, I've created
an image
gallery of the TS-219.